


Vital Skill

by samariumwriting



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Crushes, Developing Relationship, Flirting, Fluff, M/M, Mentioned Golden Deer Students (Fire Emblem), Nonbinary My Unit | Byleth, Spoilers, Tree Climbing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 10:51:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20906444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samariumwriting/pseuds/samariumwriting
Summary: Claude can't climb trees. For tactical reasons, he asks Lorenz to teach him.





	Vital Skill

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be a FE rarepair week request which a couple people asked for on twitter, but I decided that it wasn't rare enough so I just gave it a fic. This has spoilers for part one of FE3H, as a warning, but I hope you enjoy :)

When Lorenz was a child, he didn’t always have the impeccable manners he’d developed as a young adult. He had, after all, been a child, and children, on the whole, did as they pleased, without thinking of whether they should or should not do something for fear of creating a bad image for themselves.

It was something he’d grown out of, of course, because there was nothing more ill-befitting of the heir of a noble house than getting his clothes dirty while playing outside. It was far more acceptable to spend his time indoors reading a book or playing chess. So that was what he ended up doing, most of the time, and he quite enjoyed that.

Needless to say, he’d expected that Claude would be the opposite. The kind of person who should be indoors, keeping his thoughts to himself most of the time, actually learning things rather than running his mouth about everything he didn’t understand. Lorenz expected Claude to spend all his time outside, exerting himself like he was a commoner, coming back every evening covered from head to foot in dust.

Claude was not in any way what Lorenz expected him to be. He was infuriating, and completely improper almost all of the time, but he was everything but outdoorsy. Outside of first formal events and then classes, most of the times Lorenz saw Claude involved him being in the library, practically buried in a pile of books.

Everything about Claude was fairly unexpected. Bar his absolute inability to respect the code of honour of the nobility, everything he found out about Claude was a surprise discovery. He was not the son of the late Duke Godfrey, he was not unintelligent, and he was...decidedly not outdoorsy.

“What do you mean, you can’t climb trees?” Lorenz asked. It was part of one of the Professor’s latest ridiculous strategies for the Battle of the Eagle and Lion. Traditionally, the Black Eagle class took the ballista at Gronder’s central hill, leaving both the Blue Lions and Golden Deer vulnerable when approaching.

The Professor’s admittedly bizarre idea featured the more fragile but nimble students of the class climbing trees for cover and advancing to the west to take out the Black Eagle students first. The hope was that this group could then wrap around to help mop up the Blue Lions. It was sound, except… “I meant what I said,” Claude replied. “Give me a short while and a rope and I can probably do it, but I can’t just shoot up a tree in seconds. Sorry, Teach.”

“That’s fine,” they said. “You can head up the centre with Lorenz to help cover you. Ignatz, Lysithea, and Marianne, can you manage on your own?”

“We need a magic user going east to deal with Dedue,” Claude said, the strategy shifted, and the conversation continued. But the implication of Claude’s words hadn’t left Lorenz, and for some reason, they continued to play on his mind.

It didn’t come up again for a while - there was no reason for the topic to resurface. They won the mock battle without even another mention of Claude climbing a tree. And the issue remained irrelevant until they came to planning the defence of Garreg Mach.

“Ideally we don’t want you outside the walls too much,” the Professor explained, “but it may be better to take the fight to them if we can isolate their strike force on the space just outside the monastery. But if you go out there, I want you in the trees as much as possible. The Empire’s army is often slow and unwieldy and we need to outmaneuver them as much as possible.”

Lorenz looked at Claude. Claude was looking at the Professor. “Sounds good to me,” Claude said. And then he looked over at Lorenz like he knew he’d been looking all along. “Hey Lorenz, how do you fancy teaching me to climb a tree this week?”

He spluttered. “Surely Leonie would be better for that job,” he suggested. “Or Raphael, if you need a leg up.” Raphael flexed his muscles and grinned.

“No, Lorenz should do it,” the Professor said. There was that small, humoured smile on their face that made them look...human, despite their change in appearance. “Let me know if you don’t make any progress and I’ll adjust my strategy a little. Can everyone else climb trees?” The rest of the class nodded, though Lysithea and Cyril both conceded that they could do with a leg up if there was anyone nearby. In turn, the Professor assigned Ingrid to fight alongside the former and a wyvern of his own to the latter.

“Why can’t you ride a wyvern in the battle?” Lorenz asked later, the two of them standing at the base of a small tree. Claude looked up at it.

“As many as possible are needed for a likely evacuation,” he said. “I can ride a horse, but Cyril struggles with that. It’ll also be much tougher to get him to leave Rhea’s side than me, so he needs something that can go further.”

“It makes sense,” Lorenz said, also looking at the tree, “but I don’t understand why I have to teach you this.”

“Maybe Teach knew you really wanted to get your hands on my thighs,” Claude said with a wink, and Lorenz frowned. Firmly. And glared at Claude, just to try and get the message across that he had definitely never thought about Claude’s muscular thighs. Ever. “Relax, Lorenz, you’re way too tense right now. Just...I don’t know. Give me some pointers if I mess up?”

Despite Claude’s constant flirting, he wasn’t able to distract Lorenz from the fact that he clearly had no clue how to climb a tree. “Did you really never climb trees as a child?” he asked, slightly disbelievingly, watching Claude fail to get the right grip again.

“Wow, and here I thought I’d asked you for advice,” he said. “I just never did, okay? And you’re telling me that you, the pinnacle of noble behaviour, had a childhood clambering over everything you could get your bony little hands on?”

“My hands were not little and bony,” he objected, looking down at his hands. Were they bony? “And I did climb trees as a child, yes. It is a hobby of sorts that I grew out of as I matured.”

“Yet here you are, teaching it to me as a vital skill,” Claude said with a chuckle. He reached out and missed the branch above him again. “This is way harder than it looks.”

“Only because you have never done it before,” he said. “Trust more in your left arm, Claude. You won’t fall if you just lean a little further when you try to climb higher.”

“It’s easy for you to say,” Claude called down, but he followed Lorenz’s advice and eventually ended up far enough up the tree that they could class it as properly climbed. “I guess I have to come down now?”

“You do,” Lorenz said, watching him shakily make his way down the tree. It was going to take a fair amount of work to get him proficient enough to use it on the battlefield within a fortnight.

By the time the Empire’s army were barely a day away from the monastery, and everyone was prepared to flee, Claude was in fact fairly decent at climbing. He was a fast learner, and had been for the whole year they’d spent together at the Academy. But at the end of their last lesson, Claude seemed to be struggling a little.

“Just stand underneath me, okay?” he called down. Lorenz couldn’t see what kind of difficulty he was having, hidden in the leaves like he was. From the sound of it, he’d caught his foot on something, but wrenching it free was difficult when also trying to stay balanced on a thin branch.

There was rustling for a few minutes, and Claude let out a few muted curses Lorenz couldn’t quite make out. He was glad, almost, because if he could understand what Claude was saying then he wouldn’t be able to let it slide. He wasn’t finding tearing Claude apart quite so funny now they’d spent so much time together, just the pair of them.

Claude was strangely likeable when there was no one else either of them had to prove themselves to. He was funny and hopelessly intelligent, and surprisingly...well, Lorenz wouldn’t exactly describe him as vulnerable, but there was more to him than the cold smile and sharp words they’d started off with.

Lorenz was, unsurprisingly, pulled out of his thoughts by a loud cry. A moment later, Claude called out “yeah, I think you might have to catch me!” Lorenz lurched forwards, trying to work out where the voice had come from exactly and where Claude would fall. He craned his neck up, trying to place his arms just right-

Claude fell through the branches, bringing two down nearly on top of Lorenz before he landed squarely in his arms. “...ouch,” he managed, a small, sheepish grin on his face. “Sorry about that, Lorenz.”

“You are a fool,” he said, moving to lower Claude to the ground. “And you owe me a favour for this.”

“Hey, hey, don’t put me down just yet!” Claude said, and Lorenz stopped. Frozen in place, Claude halfway to the ground, practically cradled in his arms. Claude was heavier than he’d expected, honestly. “I might have broken my ankle. Could you lower me to be seated instead of standing?”

He sighed heavily. “Fine,” he said, but when they approached the ground, Claude clung to his shirt. “Claude?”

“Oh, sorry about that,” he said. And then he had the audacity to wink. “I think my brain is still up in the tree. I thought I was falling again for a moment.”

“You are hopeless,” Lorenz said, but he resisted the urge to unceremoniously dump Claude on the ground and gently lowered him. Claude, of course, being the utter fool that he was, decided to pull Lorenz down with him, and he ended up practically on top of him. “Claude, what is the meaning of this?” he asked. Claude only reacted with a laugh.

“Oh, nothing much,” he said, “though perhaps I’m delirious from the pain.” Looking into his eyes (which were very, very green all of a sudden), Lorenz could tell that wasn’t the case. He seemed perfectly aware of exactly what he was doing, and his movements weren’t sloppy at all.

“Or?” he asked.

“Or,” Claude said, a wicked grin on his face, “I wanted a little something for the battle ahead.” His hand still clutching Lorenz’s jacket, he leaned in, and before Lorenz knew it, their lips had touched.

It was only for a moment. Just an instant, before Claude pulled away and Lorenz ended up sat on the grass next to him. “I suppose we’re all feeling a little reckless,” Lorenz said. Claude gave him a small smile.

“How long are you willing to be reckless for?” he asked.

This moment would not last forever. Within days, one or both of them could be dead. The Alliance would almost certainly be at war. Their families would likely be political enemies, and there would be no more lighthearted afternoons spent climbing trees or obviously feigned broken ankles.

Lorenz thought about how much he did, really, enjoy Claude’s company. Even if he was infuriating and they would inevitably be rivals for the foreseeable future. While Claude was around, the Alliance would not be as secure as it would be under Gloucester leadership, and they could never…

Lorenz was kidding himself. While he would not describe them as friends, they were at the very least companions. He felt for Claude in ways that could never match his duty. And this was one of very few times that his duty could cease to matter, if only for a little while. “Maybe we could afford to be reckless for a little while longer,” he said, and this time he was the one to close the gap.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this, please consider leaving a comment, it means a lot. You can also follow me on twitter @samariumwriting where I occasionally talk about my writing :)


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